A journey down the branches of Burke’s oak

This programme is about “small c” conservatism, which is only partially related to the less interesting and brasher “big C” version. I am sure that the presenter, Anne McElvoy, is right that this “quietly enduring belief system” only got going as a self-conscious force because it was, as she puts it, “shocked into action”.

You will not find the word “conservatism” in Dr Johnson’s great dictionary, for example (though he does define the word “Tory”). Johnson died in 1785, four years before European thought and politics were changed for ever by the French Revolution.

It was Edmund Burke, though a Whig, who fathered English conservatism. He was so horrified by what the French terrors did to property, monarchy, religion and the social fabric that he developed a theory – or rather, a passionate rhetoric – which endures to this day. He invoked the English oak as the symbol of the rooted attachments that he loved. William Wordsworth, whom he converted to conservatism, refers to him as “like an oak” in “The Prelude”. When David Cameron’s Conservatives replaced the torch as their symbol with an oak-ish sort of tree, they were paying tribute, possibly unconsciously, to Burke.

From Burke, this programme then traces the branches of the tree in daily 15-minute bites through people as various as Jane Austen, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, John Ruskin and John Arthur Roebuck, who passionately upheld, against the temperance Liberals, the right of the working man to enjoy his pint in peace. Last week, we got through the 19th century. This week, we will traverse the 20th – ending, I am told, in Grantham.

Although McElvoy’s main witness is the historian and Labour MP Tristram Hunt, there is not a trace, so far at least, of ideological animus. The series honestly seeks after truth, clearly and economically. If it has a fault, it is that it devotes too much time to the more romantic side of the conservative coin. Virtually every sage brought forward seems to hark back to an imagined medieval past. Carlyle holds up a benign 12th-century abbot as the model of communal leadership. Ruskin attacks mass production and exalts old-world craftsmanship. Disraeli invokes a “semi-feudal alliance” of aristocrats and labourers.

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Such fancies were indeed powerful in the Victorian imagination – and imagination, as McElvoy points out, is central to the conservative character. She rightly draws attention to the fact that the Primrose League, so named in honour of Disraeli’s favourite flower, was the largest active political organisation in British history (two million members). Its members were called “knights” and “dames” and they formed “habitations” rather than associations. It says something for conservatism’s odd innovative power that the League was also the first large body to “recognise the usefulness of women in politics”.

There were other conservative strands, though. One was that of ameliorating moderation: it was the Liberals who tended to be fiercer and, often, more imperialist. Another was of scorn. One of the strongest features of the conservative mind is its pleasure that, as Dr Johnson himself put it, “most schemes of human improvement are very laughable things”. It therefore laughs a lot at the ideas of socialists, Utopians, egalitarians, utilitarians, vegetarians etc. It would have been good, for instance, to have heard about James Fitzjames Stephen’s wonderful debunking book of the 1870s, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.

McElvoy also does not fully explain the perplexing ability of conservatism to come out on top. If it were mainly about dancing round maypoles, it would have been little more than a hobby. Instead, it is arguably the strongest way of thinking/feeling/living in these islands (and, in different forms, in many other countries too).

“Small c” conservatism is a matter of temperament as well as of opinions. Its instinctive reaction to the phrase “Something must be done” is “Why?” The best way to persuade is not to get all excited or moralistic about what is new, but to show why what “must be done” will secure what already exists. The rule of thumb is the famous quotation from that great Sicilian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The Marquess of Salisbury, the Victorian prime minister who was the greatest political thinker ever to occupy No 10, gets a mention in the programme. His assault on Disraeli’s Reform Act of 1867 for giving “absolute control” of the country to “the poorest classes in the towns” is quoted. Fair enough, but it would have been illuminating to have added that Salisbury was later a proponent of “villa conservatism” – the idea that home ownership for the millions, whom he instinctively feared, would help secure liberty and stability (and get votes). It is a cunning conservative trick, if traditions are looking a bit threadbare, to invent some new ones, imply that they are jolly old and get new people to buy into them.

How to define a conservative? It is impossible, I think. But just as some people are said to have “gaydar”, which allows them to tell at once who is homosexual, conservatives can somehow be recognised.

Yet quite recently, I got a nasty shock in this respect. I had always believed that Geoffrey Howe, despite his Europhilia, was a true conservative of the moderate sort. And then I read a passionate plea by him that the country must go completely metric. I can understand how a conservative might think that opposition to metrication was not worth the trouble (very few things are), but that a British one could evangelically support it seemed absolutely incomprehensible. The small things are often the most telling.